Robot & Frank (2012)

Robot & Frank arrives in 2012 carrying a caretaker robot, a declining thief, and a library on the verge of becoming a community center. The film concerns itself with memory, companionship, and the quiet indignities of aging, which places it well outside the cultural skirmishes that occupy our more excitable critics. Frank Langella plays Frank Weld, an ex-convict whose dementia is treated with a dignity that never once announces itself as a statement. The robot, a charmingly analog suit performed by a dancer, does not lecture. It gardens. It picks locks. It negotiates the terms of its own erasure with a calm the screenplay never feels compelled to moralize about.

The picture's politics are largely incidental. A wealthy young developer named Jake intends to convert the town library into something more profitable, and the heist that follows targets his jewels, which registers as a mild jab at gentrification and little more. Liv Tyler's Madison disapproves of the machine on ethical grounds, and Susan Sarandon's Jennifer runs the library with a certain weary authority, but the film remains a study of a man, not a thesis about gender. Race never enters the frame as a subject, and neither does the climate, the body, or the question of who gets to be cast.

What lingers is the film's refusal to sermonize. Its makers said plainly they wanted to consider technology without a moral undercurrent, and they kept that promise. The result is a small, humane crime comedy that treats cognitive decline as an illness rather than a cause, and treats its audience as adults. In an era that rewards films for their positions, this one offers only a man, a robot, and a tomato garden. It is, by the standards of our current accounting, remarkably quiet. That is not a failing. It is simply a different kind of film.